Summary: Kamala Harris certainly left an impression after Thursday night’s Democratic presidential debate. She launched an insurgent, buccaneering attack on front runner Joe Biden. Biden, like a great British three-decked ship of the line from the days of Nelson, sailed relatively imperturbably through the debate. However, in the days that followed, both he and Kamala find themselves undertaking damage control. It is not unlikely that Sen. Harris’ broadsides may have been a tactical, or even strategic, error on her part. By concentrating on Biden’s past, rather than on America’s future, the California senator may have unwittingly given Donald Trump ammunition he doesn’t deserve.
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There is no doubt that in the Democratic presidential debate last Thursday evening Kamala Harris sailed into battle with a kind of insurgent, almost buccaneering attack on front runner Joe Biden.
Following up on Cory Booker’s self-referential and pious attack on the quondam vice president, Kamala decided to prosecute an attack based on Joe’s opposition to mandated school busing during the 1970s.
Joe bore up fairly well under the attack, sailing imperturbably through MSNBC’s piss poor excuse for a debate like a great British three-decker first rate line-of-battle-ship from the days of the great Nelson. (Instead of relying upon the grossly overrated Chuck Todd, MSNBC might have been better advised to have retained the services of Commons Speaker John Bercow, who could probably have kept the otherwise fractious pool of Democratic presidential hopefuls in line with a few growls of “ORDER.”)
Uncle Joe’s performance was not after the style of Vice Adm. Horatio, Viscount Nelson of Burnham Thorpe and The Nile, Duke of Brontë, KG, RN, but if Biden’s performance lacked the so-called Nelson touch, it was nonetheless adequate, serviceable, and workmanlike, more after the style of Nelson’s contemporaries Sir Samuel Hood or Cuthbert, Baron Collingwood of Caldburne and Hethpool, not dazzling, but, as Adm. Of the Fleet of the Soviet Union Sergey Georgievich Gorshkov might have put it, “good enough.”
Nonetheless, in a Democratic primary that resembles nothing so much as a Hobbesian state of nature, of “war of all, against all, with life poor, nasty, brutish, and short,” Thursday night’s debate ought to have demonstrated to Uncle Joe that he needs to up his game. Though Kamala’s broadsides damaged his rigging, she didn’t score any hits between wind and water, or below the waterline. Nevertheless, Uncle Joe would profit from taking some time to reflect on lessons learned.
So, by the same token, would Kamala.
Though her attacks on Vice President Biden might play well in largely white, "progressive," Sanders-left circles in the Democratic Party, I think she may have done herself some real damage among African-Americans who remember Uncle Joe fondly from his service as Barack Obama’s vice president, and among more moderate centrist white Democrats.
By opening up the ancient, 1970s-vintage wound of mandated busing and pouring salt on it, Kamala may have unwittingly given Donald Trump a new treasure trove of ammunition against Uncle Joe if, as is generally expected, Biden remains the front runner in this endless, agonizing, circular-firing-squad Democratic primary. After all, the divisions opened up by forced busing have largely been ameliorated, or at least healed up and haired over, during the 40 years since busing was such an existential issue for so many Americans.
Of course, like Kamala, I have my own personal memories of court ordered busing in Los Angeles. I was an elementary school student when Los Angeles County Superior Court Judge Paul Egly found himself overseeing the desegregation cases in which the LAUSD was embroiled at the time. Like many children of educated, pale parents, I found myself confronted with the very real possibility that if I stayed in the LA public schools, I could find myself bussed to Compton, Watts, or some other part of South L.A. County with which I was totally unfamiliar in order to meet some court mandated goal of integrating the public schools.
This, notwithstanding the fact that my little elementary school in the Cahuenga Pass, being smack dab in the middle of the entertainment industry, was one of the most diverse and naturally integrated schools in the entire district. My parents, white, liberal, and withal, of the well-educated demographic that made no bones about supporting George McGovern in 1972, found that their tolerance for court ordered social experimentation ended with their academically "gifted" son.
My, and my parents’, hesitancy about busing had little to do with racial insecurity. But it did have a great deal to do with the fact that, by the metrics of the Los Angeles Unified School District, I was indeed considered academically “gifted.” At the time, gifted kids, along with their intellectually challenged counterparts, represented no more than 4% of the student population in the LAUSD, representing about 2% of that population at either end of the spectrum.. However, as a result of federal and state mandates, together with an “anti-elitist” bias on the part of educational bureaucrats within the LAUSD, far more resources were devoted to “mainstreaming” the intellectually challenged, while the “gifted” kids were largely left to fend for themselves.
When the schools in our area of the sprawling, hypertrophic, overbureaucratized LAUSD were ordered to begin implementing "comprehensive, immediate, integration planning” for the 1973-1974 school year, my parents, seeing the writing on the wall, with all its implications for their "gifted" third-grader, took me out of the public schools, put me in an Episcopal elementary school in Studio City, and unwittingly facilitated my introduction to Conformist religion. (I’m older now, But like That Other Gay Conformist Pete Buttigieg, I’m still fabulously Episcopalian.)
Many of my parents’ ideological and doctrinaire acquaintances, still caught up in the afterglow of the 1960s, still full of wide-eyed, uncritical admiration for Chairman Mao and the Cultural Revolution (about which, not speaking or reading Chinese, they had only such knowledge as was filtered to them in the pages of Guoji Shudian’s propaganda periodical China Reconstructs), insisted that every aspect of the personal was political. Seeing the decision to seek private education for my parents’ “gifted,” if precocious, brat, they rushed to place the worst, most racist possible interpretation on that decision.
Now, I know that the heresy hunters and purists of the Sanders
left will excoriate me as some kind of racist, largely on account of my
reluctance, as a ten-year-old, to leave what was already a diverse and
integrated elementary school seven minutes walk from my home and
familiar to me. For many hyper-liberals of my family’s
acquaintance in the Democratic Party at the time, particularly those who
did not have children, our familial decision to place me in that
Episcopal school represented a betrayal not of our principles, but of
theirs. It’s always amusing how nothing is impossible for the
person who doesn’t have to take it on him- or herself, like a number of
our more doctrinaire hard-left acquaintances who fell out with us over my
placement at St. Michael And All Angels School in Studio City.
So, if Kamala Harris can account for her elementary education by being a beneficiary of busing, I can account for my Conformist Religion by being one of those kids who didn’t want to be bussed to Compton, Watts, or somewhere else in South County.
So, for me, as it does for Kamala Harris, busing still recalls personal wounds. It still recalls the anguish that can happen when those whom one had thought friends take that Maoist route of defining as political every aspect of one’s personal life, “put[ting] politics in command.” The social and political divisions over busing in Los Angeles played themselves out over more than a decade before finally quieting down. In Los Angeles, and I expect in most of America, the fight over busing eventually gave way to other, more immediately pressing, issues. In short, the wounds of busing healed up and haired over.
It is difficult to see, almost 40 years on, what Kamala hopes to accomplish by ripping open those ancient wounds, pouring salt on them, and insisting upon relitigating them. Busing in Los Angeles, though a well intended social experiment theoretically intended to implement the Supreme Court’s landmark decision in Brown v. Board of Education, proved to be a disaster in actual practice. While Kamala Harris may have been the beneficiary of busing in Berkeley, the benefits of busing in Southern California and elsewhere were few and far between.
Moreover, we must insist on looking at events 40 years ago in their context, and stop insisting on applying aggressively retrospective purity testing to unworkable, unsustainable social experiments set in motion by the “least dangerous branch.” There is nothing more counterproductive than retrospective purity testing, and I think it’s safe to postulate that while Kamala may experience a brief bump in the polls, she may lose the support of centrist and moderate Democrats over the long-term.
Additionally, Democrats, be they Bernard Sanders, Kamala Harris, or any other Democratic candidate stumbling over him- or herself to show his or her “wokeness,” should remember that political campaigning is largely conducted not just in the future tense, but in the future conditional tense. Moreover, by concentrating on utterances in Joe Biden’s — or any candidate’s — past, while ignoring the very real, existential threat represented by Donald Trump and his fellow travelers one runs the risk of losing not just his or her future, but the entire country’s future.
For we know of two things that ought to inform the messaging of every Democratic presidential hopeful this cycle. First, we must remember and communicate to our constituency at every opportunity the fact that Donald Trump is an existential threat to America, to peace, to democracy, to a rules-based international order, and to freedom itself. We must communicate to our constituency at every opportunity that Donald Trump is an America-destroying traitor, meriting the swift and severe pains and penalties the United States has historically meted out to those who betray it to enemies national. That’s the only politics of grievance we should be engaged in for the 2020 election cycle.
Second, we know that we are locked in an existential, even Manichaean, struggle for ownership of America’s and the world’s future. The Republicans offer us not a future as such, but an atavistic retreat to the world of 1914 or 1933, a time in which, as Winston Churchill has written, “[u]nsatisfied by material prosperity the nations turned restlessly towards strife internal or external.”
Contrariwise, Democrats know that in an expanding future, in which women hold up half the sky, and in which invidious distinctions of color, religion, race and ethnicity, sex, sexuality, and gender, have lost their power to divide and to enthrall, and in which an aroused world acts in concert to contain the existential threat of global climate change and to act as responsible stewards of what the Book of Common Prayer calls "this fragile earth, our island home," we have no choice but to overcome nameless and unreasoning fear, and to come together quickly, for our good and the good of the planet.
But we cannot attain that future if, as Kamala Harris so foolishly insisted upon doing last Thursday night, we insist upon looking backward while prosecuting a politics of ancient grievance.
I’ve known Kamala Harris since she was District Attorney in San Francisco. I was hugely taken by her insistence that we should not so much be “tough on crime,” but “smart on crime.” I thought then, and I think now, that Kamala is a very smart and admirable woman. I thought she made an effective Attorney General of California, and I have been favorably impressed with her performance as a United States senator. Thus, I was, and remain, deeply disappointed by her appeal to a politics of grievance.
That’s the kind of shit we expect from Donald Trump, not from the woman who wants to be his successor and to lead this nation back to correct and honorable government.
I had expected better of the senator whom I had supported, to whose campaign I had contributed, and for whom I had volunteered.
Girlfriend, get your shit together!
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is an attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices law in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He served two terms on the Cathedral City city council, and has a smidgen of experience in politics. He is very disappointed in Kamala Harris, from whom he had expected so very much better than a politics of ancient grievance. As a gay man, he has the right to say to her “girlfriend! Get your shit together!” The views expressed herein are his own, and not necessarily the views of any organization or entity with which he is associated. Unless you like them, in which case they can be yours, too.
Saturday, June 29, 2019
APPARATCHIKS, BUREAUCRATS, AND CAREERISTS: THOUGHTS ON THE “OFFICIAL” LGBT MOVEMENT AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Summary: After 50 years of Pride, the bloom is off that rose for an awful lot of queerfolk. The LGBT civil rights movement, which had seemed so full of promise and excitement, has in many ways become as stultified, as domesticated, and as bourgeois as the Soviet Union had become 50 years after the October Revolution. In short, the queer nation has become domesticated and endotic, the stuff of political calculus, plundering forays by advertisers, and a source for material by comics and commentators seeking to demonstrate how “edgy” or how “woke” they are, as well as by an “Official Movement” that has taken over the struggle, commandeered its agenda, and defined who is “orthodox” and who is a “heretic” among the queer nation, meriting being written, airbrushed, photoshopped, and deepfaked out of our queer history.
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Cathedral City, June 29, 2019 --Fifty years after Stonewall, while queer academics flay one another alive in sterile, how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the–of-a-pin scholastic debates over whether the events at Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn half a century ago last night really constitute the beginning of the movement for queer civil rights in this country, or whether Stonewall is just a “convenient white, cisgender, gay male creation myth,” as urged with considerable anger, nay, venom, by certain academic outliers, it is a somewhat melancholy, if inconvenient, truth that for many queerfolk, the bloom may be off the prideful rose.
Of course, the debate over Stonewall’s place in our queer history is hardly new; for years, historians of the American Revolution have been exchanging musket fire among themselves about when the American Revolutionary war actually began.
There is certainly an argument to be made that the American Revolution may well have begun in 1765, when HM Government, desperately seeking to recoup the costs incurred in prosecuting the Seven Years’ War — which actually began in North America, and which we know as the French and Indian War — of 1756 to 1763, sought to tax the unrepresented-in-Parliament colonies as if they were a part of metropolitan Britain proper. After all, the Seven Years’ War/French and Indian War had cost Great Britain’s exchequer a staggering amount of money, which Parliament was desperate to recapture.
It was no surprise, therefore, that Parliament would seek to recoup at least some of that staggering expense of the war from the colonies on whose behalf HM Government believed the war had been fought in the first place. The leadup to the process by which the British lost America has been well documented in numerous learned monographs, not least of which is Barbara W. Tuchman’s delightful 1984 monograph March of Folly, in which she devotes a chapter of just over 100 pages to explaining and chronicling how “the British los[t] America.”
But if the run-up to the American revolution can be said to have occupied the roughly 10 years between the passage of the Stamp Act, 5 Geo.3, c. 12 (1765) and the Boston Tea Party of December, 1773, together with the so-called Intolerable Acts intended to punish and coerce the uppity colonials of the Massachusetts Bay colony, the actual beginning of our national liberation struggle — the event that put the match to the metaphorical powder keg — was the now famous pair of skirmishes at Lexington and Concord on April 18, 1775. With Lexington and Concord, the run-up to the American Revolutionary War ended and hostilities could be said to have begun in earnest.
Some historians of our queer movement for authentic first-class citizenship in the Commonwealth have urged, somewhat pedantically one thinks, that it is somehow “wrong” to treat the resistance —the prophylactic violence, if you will— to an NYPD raid on the Stonewall Inn in the West Village by a somewhat motley assemblage of drag queens, street kids, hustlers, transpeople, and garden-variety gay men and lesbians, as the “beginning,” as it were, of the LGBT civil rights movement as such.
Yet, for all the precursors —all the movements for queer rights that had died aborning, all the isolated acts of resistance by courageous individuals, all the eloquent pleas, all the queer martyrs and martyrdoms, including the three trials of Oscar Wilde— the events which have come to be shorthanded simply as Stonewall have, for better or worse, become the generally accepted Epoch, or starting point, of our queer calendar, much as September 22, 1792 represented the start date of the French Republican Calendar (BTW today is the 12th of Messidor, an 227).
And, taking Stonewall as that generally well accepted Epoch of our calendar, we may now reckon 50 years to have passed since our Lexington and Concord, since the evening when the New York Police Department, acting out the role of the redcoats, provoked the wrath of those drag queens, street kids, hustlers, transpeople, and garden-variety queerfolk whose salutary prophylaxis of violence must have struck the NYPD and straight observers much as the resistance of the train band on Lexington Common must have struck the British regulars under Marine Major John Pitcairn.
And as the regulars retreated in good order on Boston, with the Massachusetts militia taking shots at them from behind every tree and fence along the way, they, like the NYPD at Stonewall nearly two centuries later, must have had at least some inkling that things were about to change, and that the old dispensations must soon pass entirely away.
Lo, it is half a century now that we who are queer and our brethren and sistren have lived with the reality of an ongoing movement for first-class citizenship in the commonwealth. How far we have come from 1971's Baker v. Nelson, (1972) 409 U.S. 810, in which the Supreme Court held that two gay men’s claim that the Constitution guaranteed the right to marry should be dismissed “for want of a substantial federal [constitutional] question” to Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) 576 U.S. ____, 135 S. Ct. 2584; 192 L. Ed. 2d 609; which unequivocally overruled Baker and opened to every same-sex couple in the United States the doors of marriage equality!
Yet, even as much as Obergefell guaranteed to Jonathan and David or to Ruth and Naomi or even to Adam and Steve the liberty of marital contract, an unintended consequence of marriage for queerfolk has been, at least in part, something of an expectation that queerfolk will conform themselves to the dispensations and morés of the larger straight community. In that regard, our greatest civil rights triumph may, ironically, open us up to all intents and purposes to demands that we all make honest queers of each other by marching down the aisle as soon as, or even before, we have physically consummated our relationships.
In short, it is not unreasonable to ask whether our own scapegrace exoticism, our own reckless fabulousness, our own joie de vivre, is in danger of being lost. Have we sacrificed upon a nuptial altar our quality of being different enough from our straight neighbors that we can hold up their shibboleths to relentless, critical examination? More to the point, have we become, fifty years on, in many ways become as stultified, as domesticated, and as left-bourgeois as the Soviet Union had become fifty years after the October Revolution? More briefly still, are we becoming endotic, and safely assimilated to our straight neighbors?
Certainly, there are worrisome signs and portents that we are becoming not just endotic, but indeed domesticated. More than 40 years ago, when my parents, who might now be called by the “woke” term “straight allies,” were socializing with gay and lesbian friends on a regular basis, one of their gay friends, a passionate Trotskyite anarchist who had been at Stonewall on That Night, said something that worked its way into my youthful, proto-homosexual brain.
In sum and substance, riffing on the words of then-still-living Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas, my parents’ passionate Trotskyite anarchist said one night at dinner that what was then called simply the gay community should be eternally vigilant against the tendency to develop what Djilas had called a “new class” of bureaucrats, careerists, and apparatchiks. I learned two new things that night. First I learned about Milovan Djilas and his relationship to also then-still-living Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito, and second (and perhaps more ominously) I also got my first inkling of the divisions that were beginning to appear within the queer nation.
For my parents’ friend had spoken prophetically at our domestic dinner table about the dangers implicit in what he saw as an emergent “Official [queer] Movement,” taken over and staffed, as it were, by that “new class,” which in due course would arrogate to itself the power to define the goals, agenda, and ideology of the community as well as the punishment of those who do not conform thereto.
Though it would be the better part of another decade before I would acknowledge to myself that I was very much a boy who liked boys, let alone that I had kissed other boys and had found it liberating, pleasurable, and even joyful; and though the awful reality of the AIDS crisis would for another decade beyond that keep me so far inside the closet that I could see Narnia from its depths, the ominous words our passionate Trotskyite had spoken at our dining table never left me.
Indeed, I soon became aware through unhappy personal experience of how a Djilas-esque “new class,” had emerged to form the “Official Movement” against which my parents' passionate Trotskyite friend had inveighed so strongly at their dinner table. The personnel of this Official Movement were the kind of mandarins, apparatchiks, careerists, bureaucrats, men-and-women-on the make, victory pimps, star fuckers, and pushers-to-the-front-of-the-line that tend to attract themselves like barnacles, a virus, or a cancer to any movement for social change. The women and men who made up the personnel of the Official Movement commandeered and arrogated to themselves the setting of our agenda, the “right” to speak for the movement as a whole, and, worst of all, the right to define who was “orthodox” and who was a “heretic” within our queer civil-rights effort. Consequently, the Official Movement was nothing if not highly territorial.
Moreover, the Official Movement tended, rather like the early Christian church, to present a united front to the outside, to those who do not share its belief structure. However, if the early church presented a united front to heathens and pagans, it was sorely divided against itself. Arian against Catholic, monophysite against orthodox, East against West, Alexandrian against Constantinopolitan, and on and on. Similarly, the Official Movement, for all its exterior monolithic aspect, was, and continues to be, sorely divided along lines, among others, of politics, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and sexual expression.
And each such group within the movement has learned to practice its own particularly parochial or fissiparous form of identity politics and identitarianism, while remaining blissfully unmindful of Charles de Gaulle’s pithy aphorism “[c]omment voulez-vous gouverner un pays qui a deux cent quarante-six variétés de fromage?” How can you govern a country with 246 varieties of cheese? But, pace mon général, catty debates over Brie, Gruyère, or Roquefort notwithstanding, the Official Movement was remarkably unified in setting its face against any “outsider” who dared to display any kind of independence or initiative, or who departed from the announced agenda of that Official Movement.
Thus, in the spring of 1993, when I took on a challenge to California’s then-gender-specific marriage law, litigating on behalf of the two young gay men who were my clients, the Official Movement turned on me as if I had, in one sweeping and comprehensive blasphemy, denied the existence of Almighty God and the virginity of His mother. Professional colleagues of mine “ordered,” “instructed,” and “demanded” that I cease to represent these clients and that I not proceed with the litigation of the case. The media within the community basically blacklisted me; if they covered our case at all, it was a tiny, dismissive bit of filler in the most undesirable inside left page, below-the-fold periodical real estate conceivable. The then -and still, God help us- Executive Director of the Los Angeles LGBT Center chose to speak as scornfully as she could in public about me and my clients.
After all, the doyens and doyennes of the Official Movement took pains to school me, the queer issue du jour was lifting the ban on queerfolk in the military. Now, having been a Democratic activist since 1972, and having worked in California for Fritz Mondale’s unsuccessful 1984 presidential campaign and for Evan Bayh’s victorious 1988 Indiana gubernatorial effort, I knew, rather better than the politically unschooled queer boys and queer girls of the Official Movement, many of whom have now gravitated to the Bernard Sanders camp, that “gays in the military” was not an issue with respect to which Bill Clinton would be able to exert any traction whatsoever. The President’s own Party shivved him on the issue, and Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz made it part of their appeal to Republican voters in the 1994 midterms. I could read the prevailing winds, I could read the whip counts, and I knew that Bill Clinton did not have the votes or the support in Congress to lift the ban.
However, I knew that there was a shift happening in state courts on the issue of same-gender marriage. Though it would be two-plus decades before Obergefell, the courts of the states were starting to look more sympathetically at the case for same-gender marriage. In Hawai’i, the state Supreme Court, in Baehr v. Lewin, (1993) 74 Haw. 530, on remand and rehearing, Baehr v. Miike, (1996) 80 Haw. 341, had, in 1993, ordered the state of Hawai’i to demonstrate a compelling interest in limiting the liberty of marital contract to opposite-gender couples or otherwise lift the marriage ban.
Thus, when the “emissaries” of the Official Movement had told me and my clients to back off, I had suggested to them that the result of a California state court challenge to our gender specific marriage law might not produce the kind of harshly reactionary result they were anticipating. My response to their demands did nothing but arouse in the Official Movement a vengeful spirit against me and my clients that has lasted to the present day.
The Official Movement could not or would not seem, however, to distinguish SCOTUS’s backward -looking, homophobic decision in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) 478 U.S. 186, from the much more promising jurisprudence coming out of Hawai’i. They did not seem to understand or want to understand that a California court would probably do one of two things with our case. Either a California court would find the Hawai’i decision persuasive, or it would be so taken aback by the very nature of the relief we were seeking that they would deny our petition in a brief, one sentence per curiam decision saying “the petition is denied.” Certainly, I thought then, and I think now, that a California court would not engage in the kind of gratuitous homophobia that underlay Baker v. Nelson, and hold that no constitutional question had been presented.
Notwithstanding the damnifications of the Official Movement, my clients agreed, and we persevered with the case. Of all of the mandarins, apparatchiks, careerists, and bureaucrats of the Official Movement, only one professional colleague took the time to visit with me as one professional to another about the case and the jurisprudential climate in which we were operating. In our discussions, we arrived at a consensus that the time might be premature, but it was worth taking a flyer even if we were probably ten to 20 years away from marriage equality being taken seriously in either state or federal court and that a national “conversation” needed to occur before straight America could be comfortable with the prospect of Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David tying the nuptial knot and making honest queerfolk of each other.
Meanwhile, states throughout the country were demonstrating a propensity for what Lyndon Johnson famously called “frontlash,” a preemptive series of legislative strikes against an event which has yet to occur. Yet, though 31 states wrote some varying form of same-gender marriage ban into their constitutional or statutory enactments, (including Hawai’i, where, in response to Baehr, the Mormon and Roman Catholic churches bankrolled a bigoted and homophobic initiative outlawing same-gender marriage in that state) these homophobic anti-marriage laws had the effect of waking the sleeping dog, which our parents had always told us to let lie.
As these states proceeded with their frontlash, they raised consciousness not only about marriage equality, but even more importantly, about the issue of authentic, first-class citizenship in the Commonwealth for queerfolk, and as they did so, barriers began to crumble.
In 1999, the Supreme Court of Vermont, in Baker v. State (Vt. 1999) 744 A.2d 864, reopened the whole marriage debate by holding that same-sex couples were entitled to the same rights at law as were opposite-sex couples. And so, Vermont civil unions were born.
Frontlash in California, orchestrated by the appallingly reactionary Pete Knight, led to Proposition 22, declaring that “only marriage between a man and woman is valid or recognized in California.”
However, in 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court went all in for same gender marriage in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, (2003) 440 Mass. 309, holding that the Massachusetts Constitution mandated marriage equality for same-gender couples.
In June of that same year, SCOTUS finally, belatedly, recognized that same-gender intimacy is not criminal when it struck down Texas’s criminal sodomy statute in Lawrence v. Texas, (2003) 539 U.S. 558.
Lawrence knocked out the last prop from the traditional conservative argument that same-gender intimacy tarred the entire queer nation with the brush of unspeakable criminality, which taint of unspeakable criminality justified subjecting queerfolk to the badges and incidents of slavery by denying the validity to queerfolk’s marriages, much as the laws of the antebellum South denied validity to the marriages of slaves.
As queerfolk began to win victories, particularly on the marriage front, the same issue or which my clients and I had been read out with bell, book, and candle into the outer darkness in 1993, suddenly became the new issue du jour, the new “gays in the military” issue of the first part of the 20th century. Now my clients and I had been an unsung part of that history, a history out of which my clients and I were written, airbrushed, and photoshopped the same way Lev Davidovich Trotsky was airbrushed out of so many pictures showing him with Ilyich and with Josef Visssarionovich on the Kremlin wall (Photoshop not having been invented yet). The Official Movement was very happy indeed to write, airbrush, and photoshop me and my clients out of the Official History.
Unfortunately, though my clients and I may have been airbrushed, photoshopped, deepfaked, and written out of the received queer history that will be passed on to the next generation of upcoming fags and dikes, I’m not running away to Coyoacán, México, D.F. to be assassinated like Lev Davidovich. I intend to stay and fight.
For I have no love lost for the queer boys and queer girls and queer non-binaries and queer transfolk of the Official Movement. I have little patience for Johnny-come-lately mandarins, apparatchiks, bureaucrats, and careerists, for the boys and girls on the make, the chow line crashers, the victory pimps, and -God help us, the star fuckers- who will not bear a hand when there is work to be done, but who make haste to knock everyone out of the way to get to the head of the reception line when recognition or kudos are being doled out.
So, at the risk of seeming as dour, sour, dogmatic, doctrinaire, and humorless as that bloviating bourgeois Bolshevik from Burlington, Bernard Sanders, I don’t see in this 50th anniversary of Stonewall an awful lot of cause for celebration. Not if what we are celebrating is our domestication and our endoticity. I fear we are becoming as complacent as the bourgeois Jews of Wilhelmmine and Weimar Germany allowed themselves to become in the years preceding Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
I’m reminded of the scene from the movie Midway in which Henry Fonda, as Adm. Chester Nimitz, is responding to the news that three of four Japanese carriers were burning or had been sunk. “I’d call that a great victory,” said Hal Holbrook as Cmdr. Joe Rochefort. “Trouble is, Joe,” Fonda as Nimitz replied, warning against complacency, “I want that fourth carrier.” Will we be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier? I don’t think we will.
I don’t think we will be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier because the mandarins, mavens, movers, and shakers of the Official Movement will soon fall to bickering and fighting over who the victory belongs to. They’ll soon fall to fighting over who is entitled to take possession of the kudos, and over who can be written, airbrushed, deepfaked, or photoshopped out of the history. Now should be a time for careful, considerate strategizing about lessons learned and steps for the next half-century.
However, in the words of sometime Italian Foreign Minister (and Mussolini son-in-law) Count Galeazzo Ciano, “victory knows a thousand fathers.” And each of those thousand wannabe parents have been altogether more busy fighting to have a paternity test done than on wondering what to do as our enemies gather and plan to compass our doom. For we always seem to have these arguments when we win a fight: whose baby is victory? But if we lose something, defeat, as Ciano warned, “is an orphan.” And so, while we wait for the results of the paternity tests on our victory, that metaphorical fourth carrier is still out there and it can still do wicked damage.
My doubts as to our ability to get it together in the wake of a great victory are the product of that unfortunate passage at arms with the Official Movement and the people who make it up, the mandarins, the bureaucrats, the careerists, the apparatchiks, the operators, the people-on-the-make, the checkbook activists, the gender warriors, the PC enforcers, the come-lately-to-the-party types, the chow line crashers, and —let’s shame the devil and tell the truth— the star fuckers. They will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Stonewall with little real understanding of its implications, its ramifications, or its consequences. Official Movement people will step up to the podia to claim a piece of a victory they had little or no share in making.
People in the Official Movement will engage in an orgy of self-congratulation at Stonewall 50, some rhetoric will be dished out to a couple of hundred people at gatherings around the country, and then, as the long day completes its journey into night, the crowd will disperse to the local homosexual bars, and in a matter of hours the euphoria will be gone, and the community will be back to its usual bickering, gossiping, and backbiting, all while Donald Trump and his homophobic Russian allies compass the doom of liberal democracy, and by extension, that of the queer nation.
Bitter, party of one, my table has been ready for a generation, because I see what can happen when the personnel of an Official Movement muscle their way to the head of the chow line. So I see little cause to celebrate by foregathering in 115° weather to be preached at by people who haven’t got the slightest clue about how our fight developed, where we are, where we have come from, and the future for which we are fighting.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is a Democratic attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He served two terms on the Cathedral City city council, and takes a rather dim view of the queer Official Movement which has written, airbrushed, and photoshopped him and his clients out of history. The views expressed herein are his own, and not those of any Movement, Official or otherwise. Part of this blog post is taken and adapted from his post of June 26, 2015, the day the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, and everything changed for the queer nation.
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Cathedral City, June 29, 2019 --Fifty years after Stonewall, while queer academics flay one another alive in sterile, how-many-angels-can-dance-on-the–of-a-pin scholastic debates over whether the events at Greenwich Village’s Stonewall Inn half a century ago last night really constitute the beginning of the movement for queer civil rights in this country, or whether Stonewall is just a “convenient white, cisgender, gay male creation myth,” as urged with considerable anger, nay, venom, by certain academic outliers, it is a somewhat melancholy, if inconvenient, truth that for many queerfolk, the bloom may be off the prideful rose.
Of course, the debate over Stonewall’s place in our queer history is hardly new; for years, historians of the American Revolution have been exchanging musket fire among themselves about when the American Revolutionary war actually began.
There is certainly an argument to be made that the American Revolution may well have begun in 1765, when HM Government, desperately seeking to recoup the costs incurred in prosecuting the Seven Years’ War — which actually began in North America, and which we know as the French and Indian War — of 1756 to 1763, sought to tax the unrepresented-in-Parliament colonies as if they were a part of metropolitan Britain proper. After all, the Seven Years’ War/French and Indian War had cost Great Britain’s exchequer a staggering amount of money, which Parliament was desperate to recapture.
It was no surprise, therefore, that Parliament would seek to recoup at least some of that staggering expense of the war from the colonies on whose behalf HM Government believed the war had been fought in the first place. The leadup to the process by which the British lost America has been well documented in numerous learned monographs, not least of which is Barbara W. Tuchman’s delightful 1984 monograph March of Folly, in which she devotes a chapter of just over 100 pages to explaining and chronicling how “the British los[t] America.”
But if the run-up to the American revolution can be said to have occupied the roughly 10 years between the passage of the Stamp Act, 5 Geo.3, c. 12 (1765) and the Boston Tea Party of December, 1773, together with the so-called Intolerable Acts intended to punish and coerce the uppity colonials of the Massachusetts Bay colony, the actual beginning of our national liberation struggle — the event that put the match to the metaphorical powder keg — was the now famous pair of skirmishes at Lexington and Concord on April 18, 1775. With Lexington and Concord, the run-up to the American Revolutionary War ended and hostilities could be said to have begun in earnest.
Some historians of our queer movement for authentic first-class citizenship in the Commonwealth have urged, somewhat pedantically one thinks, that it is somehow “wrong” to treat the resistance —the prophylactic violence, if you will— to an NYPD raid on the Stonewall Inn in the West Village by a somewhat motley assemblage of drag queens, street kids, hustlers, transpeople, and garden-variety gay men and lesbians, as the “beginning,” as it were, of the LGBT civil rights movement as such.
Yet, for all the precursors —all the movements for queer rights that had died aborning, all the isolated acts of resistance by courageous individuals, all the eloquent pleas, all the queer martyrs and martyrdoms, including the three trials of Oscar Wilde— the events which have come to be shorthanded simply as Stonewall have, for better or worse, become the generally accepted Epoch, or starting point, of our queer calendar, much as September 22, 1792 represented the start date of the French Republican Calendar (BTW today is the 12th of Messidor, an 227).
And, taking Stonewall as that generally well accepted Epoch of our calendar, we may now reckon 50 years to have passed since our Lexington and Concord, since the evening when the New York Police Department, acting out the role of the redcoats, provoked the wrath of those drag queens, street kids, hustlers, transpeople, and garden-variety queerfolk whose salutary prophylaxis of violence must have struck the NYPD and straight observers much as the resistance of the train band on Lexington Common must have struck the British regulars under Marine Major John Pitcairn.
And as the regulars retreated in good order on Boston, with the Massachusetts militia taking shots at them from behind every tree and fence along the way, they, like the NYPD at Stonewall nearly two centuries later, must have had at least some inkling that things were about to change, and that the old dispensations must soon pass entirely away.
Lo, it is half a century now that we who are queer and our brethren and sistren have lived with the reality of an ongoing movement for first-class citizenship in the commonwealth. How far we have come from 1971's Baker v. Nelson, (1972) 409 U.S. 810, in which the Supreme Court held that two gay men’s claim that the Constitution guaranteed the right to marry should be dismissed “for want of a substantial federal [constitutional] question” to Obergefell v. Hodges (2015) 576 U.S. ____, 135 S. Ct. 2584; 192 L. Ed. 2d 609; which unequivocally overruled Baker and opened to every same-sex couple in the United States the doors of marriage equality!
Yet, even as much as Obergefell guaranteed to Jonathan and David or to Ruth and Naomi or even to Adam and Steve the liberty of marital contract, an unintended consequence of marriage for queerfolk has been, at least in part, something of an expectation that queerfolk will conform themselves to the dispensations and morés of the larger straight community. In that regard, our greatest civil rights triumph may, ironically, open us up to all intents and purposes to demands that we all make honest queers of each other by marching down the aisle as soon as, or even before, we have physically consummated our relationships.
In short, it is not unreasonable to ask whether our own scapegrace exoticism, our own reckless fabulousness, our own joie de vivre, is in danger of being lost. Have we sacrificed upon a nuptial altar our quality of being different enough from our straight neighbors that we can hold up their shibboleths to relentless, critical examination? More to the point, have we become, fifty years on, in many ways become as stultified, as domesticated, and as left-bourgeois as the Soviet Union had become fifty years after the October Revolution? More briefly still, are we becoming endotic, and safely assimilated to our straight neighbors?
Certainly, there are worrisome signs and portents that we are becoming not just endotic, but indeed domesticated. More than 40 years ago, when my parents, who might now be called by the “woke” term “straight allies,” were socializing with gay and lesbian friends on a regular basis, one of their gay friends, a passionate Trotskyite anarchist who had been at Stonewall on That Night, said something that worked its way into my youthful, proto-homosexual brain.
In sum and substance, riffing on the words of then-still-living Yugoslav dissident Milovan Djilas, my parents’ passionate Trotskyite anarchist said one night at dinner that what was then called simply the gay community should be eternally vigilant against the tendency to develop what Djilas had called a “new class” of bureaucrats, careerists, and apparatchiks. I learned two new things that night. First I learned about Milovan Djilas and his relationship to also then-still-living Yugoslav president Josip Broz Tito, and second (and perhaps more ominously) I also got my first inkling of the divisions that were beginning to appear within the queer nation.
For my parents’ friend had spoken prophetically at our domestic dinner table about the dangers implicit in what he saw as an emergent “Official [queer] Movement,” taken over and staffed, as it were, by that “new class,” which in due course would arrogate to itself the power to define the goals, agenda, and ideology of the community as well as the punishment of those who do not conform thereto.
Though it would be the better part of another decade before I would acknowledge to myself that I was very much a boy who liked boys, let alone that I had kissed other boys and had found it liberating, pleasurable, and even joyful; and though the awful reality of the AIDS crisis would for another decade beyond that keep me so far inside the closet that I could see Narnia from its depths, the ominous words our passionate Trotskyite had spoken at our dining table never left me.
Indeed, I soon became aware through unhappy personal experience of how a Djilas-esque “new class,” had emerged to form the “Official Movement” against which my parents' passionate Trotskyite friend had inveighed so strongly at their dinner table. The personnel of this Official Movement were the kind of mandarins, apparatchiks, careerists, bureaucrats, men-and-women-on the make, victory pimps, star fuckers, and pushers-to-the-front-of-the-line that tend to attract themselves like barnacles, a virus, or a cancer to any movement for social change. The women and men who made up the personnel of the Official Movement commandeered and arrogated to themselves the setting of our agenda, the “right” to speak for the movement as a whole, and, worst of all, the right to define who was “orthodox” and who was a “heretic” within our queer civil-rights effort. Consequently, the Official Movement was nothing if not highly territorial.
Moreover, the Official Movement tended, rather like the early Christian church, to present a united front to the outside, to those who do not share its belief structure. However, if the early church presented a united front to heathens and pagans, it was sorely divided against itself. Arian against Catholic, monophysite against orthodox, East against West, Alexandrian against Constantinopolitan, and on and on. Similarly, the Official Movement, for all its exterior monolithic aspect, was, and continues to be, sorely divided along lines, among others, of politics, gender, gender identity, race, ethnicity, class, religion, and sexual expression.
And each such group within the movement has learned to practice its own particularly parochial or fissiparous form of identity politics and identitarianism, while remaining blissfully unmindful of Charles de Gaulle’s pithy aphorism “[c]omment voulez-vous gouverner un pays qui a deux cent quarante-six variétés de fromage?” How can you govern a country with 246 varieties of cheese? But, pace mon général, catty debates over Brie, Gruyère, or Roquefort notwithstanding, the Official Movement was remarkably unified in setting its face against any “outsider” who dared to display any kind of independence or initiative, or who departed from the announced agenda of that Official Movement.
Thus, in the spring of 1993, when I took on a challenge to California’s then-gender-specific marriage law, litigating on behalf of the two young gay men who were my clients, the Official Movement turned on me as if I had, in one sweeping and comprehensive blasphemy, denied the existence of Almighty God and the virginity of His mother. Professional colleagues of mine “ordered,” “instructed,” and “demanded” that I cease to represent these clients and that I not proceed with the litigation of the case. The media within the community basically blacklisted me; if they covered our case at all, it was a tiny, dismissive bit of filler in the most undesirable inside left page, below-the-fold periodical real estate conceivable. The then -and still, God help us- Executive Director of the Los Angeles LGBT Center chose to speak as scornfully as she could in public about me and my clients.
After all, the doyens and doyennes of the Official Movement took pains to school me, the queer issue du jour was lifting the ban on queerfolk in the military. Now, having been a Democratic activist since 1972, and having worked in California for Fritz Mondale’s unsuccessful 1984 presidential campaign and for Evan Bayh’s victorious 1988 Indiana gubernatorial effort, I knew, rather better than the politically unschooled queer boys and queer girls of the Official Movement, many of whom have now gravitated to the Bernard Sanders camp, that “gays in the military” was not an issue with respect to which Bill Clinton would be able to exert any traction whatsoever. The President’s own Party shivved him on the issue, and Newt Gingrich and Frank Luntz made it part of their appeal to Republican voters in the 1994 midterms. I could read the prevailing winds, I could read the whip counts, and I knew that Bill Clinton did not have the votes or the support in Congress to lift the ban.
However, I knew that there was a shift happening in state courts on the issue of same-gender marriage. Though it would be two-plus decades before Obergefell, the courts of the states were starting to look more sympathetically at the case for same-gender marriage. In Hawai’i, the state Supreme Court, in Baehr v. Lewin, (1993) 74 Haw. 530, on remand and rehearing, Baehr v. Miike, (1996) 80 Haw. 341, had, in 1993, ordered the state of Hawai’i to demonstrate a compelling interest in limiting the liberty of marital contract to opposite-gender couples or otherwise lift the marriage ban.
Thus, when the “emissaries” of the Official Movement had told me and my clients to back off, I had suggested to them that the result of a California state court challenge to our gender specific marriage law might not produce the kind of harshly reactionary result they were anticipating. My response to their demands did nothing but arouse in the Official Movement a vengeful spirit against me and my clients that has lasted to the present day.
The Official Movement could not or would not seem, however, to distinguish SCOTUS’s backward -looking, homophobic decision in Bowers v. Hardwick (1986) 478 U.S. 186, from the much more promising jurisprudence coming out of Hawai’i. They did not seem to understand or want to understand that a California court would probably do one of two things with our case. Either a California court would find the Hawai’i decision persuasive, or it would be so taken aback by the very nature of the relief we were seeking that they would deny our petition in a brief, one sentence per curiam decision saying “the petition is denied.” Certainly, I thought then, and I think now, that a California court would not engage in the kind of gratuitous homophobia that underlay Baker v. Nelson, and hold that no constitutional question had been presented.
Notwithstanding the damnifications of the Official Movement, my clients agreed, and we persevered with the case. Of all of the mandarins, apparatchiks, careerists, and bureaucrats of the Official Movement, only one professional colleague took the time to visit with me as one professional to another about the case and the jurisprudential climate in which we were operating. In our discussions, we arrived at a consensus that the time might be premature, but it was worth taking a flyer even if we were probably ten to 20 years away from marriage equality being taken seriously in either state or federal court and that a national “conversation” needed to occur before straight America could be comfortable with the prospect of Ruth and Naomi or Jonathan and David tying the nuptial knot and making honest queerfolk of each other.
Meanwhile, states throughout the country were demonstrating a propensity for what Lyndon Johnson famously called “frontlash,” a preemptive series of legislative strikes against an event which has yet to occur. Yet, though 31 states wrote some varying form of same-gender marriage ban into their constitutional or statutory enactments, (including Hawai’i, where, in response to Baehr, the Mormon and Roman Catholic churches bankrolled a bigoted and homophobic initiative outlawing same-gender marriage in that state) these homophobic anti-marriage laws had the effect of waking the sleeping dog, which our parents had always told us to let lie.
As these states proceeded with their frontlash, they raised consciousness not only about marriage equality, but even more importantly, about the issue of authentic, first-class citizenship in the Commonwealth for queerfolk, and as they did so, barriers began to crumble.
In 1999, the Supreme Court of Vermont, in Baker v. State (Vt. 1999) 744 A.2d 864, reopened the whole marriage debate by holding that same-sex couples were entitled to the same rights at law as were opposite-sex couples. And so, Vermont civil unions were born.
Frontlash in California, orchestrated by the appallingly reactionary Pete Knight, led to Proposition 22, declaring that “only marriage between a man and woman is valid or recognized in California.”
However, in 2003, the Massachusetts Supreme Judicial Court went all in for same gender marriage in Goodridge v. Dept. of Public Health, (2003) 440 Mass. 309, holding that the Massachusetts Constitution mandated marriage equality for same-gender couples.
In June of that same year, SCOTUS finally, belatedly, recognized that same-gender intimacy is not criminal when it struck down Texas’s criminal sodomy statute in Lawrence v. Texas, (2003) 539 U.S. 558.
Lawrence knocked out the last prop from the traditional conservative argument that same-gender intimacy tarred the entire queer nation with the brush of unspeakable criminality, which taint of unspeakable criminality justified subjecting queerfolk to the badges and incidents of slavery by denying the validity to queerfolk’s marriages, much as the laws of the antebellum South denied validity to the marriages of slaves.
As queerfolk began to win victories, particularly on the marriage front, the same issue or which my clients and I had been read out with bell, book, and candle into the outer darkness in 1993, suddenly became the new issue du jour, the new “gays in the military” issue of the first part of the 20th century. Now my clients and I had been an unsung part of that history, a history out of which my clients and I were written, airbrushed, and photoshopped the same way Lev Davidovich Trotsky was airbrushed out of so many pictures showing him with Ilyich and with Josef Visssarionovich on the Kremlin wall (Photoshop not having been invented yet). The Official Movement was very happy indeed to write, airbrush, and photoshop me and my clients out of the Official History.
Unfortunately, though my clients and I may have been airbrushed, photoshopped, deepfaked, and written out of the received queer history that will be passed on to the next generation of upcoming fags and dikes, I’m not running away to Coyoacán, México, D.F. to be assassinated like Lev Davidovich. I intend to stay and fight.
For I have no love lost for the queer boys and queer girls and queer non-binaries and queer transfolk of the Official Movement. I have little patience for Johnny-come-lately mandarins, apparatchiks, bureaucrats, and careerists, for the boys and girls on the make, the chow line crashers, the victory pimps, and -God help us, the star fuckers- who will not bear a hand when there is work to be done, but who make haste to knock everyone out of the way to get to the head of the reception line when recognition or kudos are being doled out.
So, at the risk of seeming as dour, sour, dogmatic, doctrinaire, and humorless as that bloviating bourgeois Bolshevik from Burlington, Bernard Sanders, I don’t see in this 50th anniversary of Stonewall an awful lot of cause for celebration. Not if what we are celebrating is our domestication and our endoticity. I fear we are becoming as complacent as the bourgeois Jews of Wilhelmmine and Weimar Germany allowed themselves to become in the years preceding Adolf Hitler’s rise to power.
I’m reminded of the scene from the movie Midway in which Henry Fonda, as Adm. Chester Nimitz, is responding to the news that three of four Japanese carriers were burning or had been sunk. “I’d call that a great victory,” said Hal Holbrook as Cmdr. Joe Rochefort. “Trouble is, Joe,” Fonda as Nimitz replied, warning against complacency, “I want that fourth carrier.” Will we be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier? I don’t think we will.
I don’t think we will be smart enough to pursue that metaphorical fourth carrier because the mandarins, mavens, movers, and shakers of the Official Movement will soon fall to bickering and fighting over who the victory belongs to. They’ll soon fall to fighting over who is entitled to take possession of the kudos, and over who can be written, airbrushed, deepfaked, or photoshopped out of the history. Now should be a time for careful, considerate strategizing about lessons learned and steps for the next half-century.
However, in the words of sometime Italian Foreign Minister (and Mussolini son-in-law) Count Galeazzo Ciano, “victory knows a thousand fathers.” And each of those thousand wannabe parents have been altogether more busy fighting to have a paternity test done than on wondering what to do as our enemies gather and plan to compass our doom. For we always seem to have these arguments when we win a fight: whose baby is victory? But if we lose something, defeat, as Ciano warned, “is an orphan.” And so, while we wait for the results of the paternity tests on our victory, that metaphorical fourth carrier is still out there and it can still do wicked damage.
My doubts as to our ability to get it together in the wake of a great victory are the product of that unfortunate passage at arms with the Official Movement and the people who make it up, the mandarins, the bureaucrats, the careerists, the apparatchiks, the operators, the people-on-the-make, the checkbook activists, the gender warriors, the PC enforcers, the come-lately-to-the-party types, the chow line crashers, and —let’s shame the devil and tell the truth— the star fuckers. They will celebrate the 50th anniversary of Stonewall with little real understanding of its implications, its ramifications, or its consequences. Official Movement people will step up to the podia to claim a piece of a victory they had little or no share in making.
People in the Official Movement will engage in an orgy of self-congratulation at Stonewall 50, some rhetoric will be dished out to a couple of hundred people at gatherings around the country, and then, as the long day completes its journey into night, the crowd will disperse to the local homosexual bars, and in a matter of hours the euphoria will be gone, and the community will be back to its usual bickering, gossiping, and backbiting, all while Donald Trump and his homophobic Russian allies compass the doom of liberal democracy, and by extension, that of the queer nation.
Bitter, party of one, my table has been ready for a generation, because I see what can happen when the personnel of an Official Movement muscle their way to the head of the chow line. So I see little cause to celebrate by foregathering in 115° weather to be preached at by people who haven’t got the slightest clue about how our fight developed, where we are, where we have come from, and the future for which we are fighting.
-xxx-
Paul S. Marchand is a Democratic attorney who lives in Cathedral City and practices in the adjacent Republican retirement redoubt of Rancho Mirage. He served two terms on the Cathedral City city council, and takes a rather dim view of the queer Official Movement which has written, airbrushed, and photoshopped him and his clients out of history. The views expressed herein are his own, and not those of any Movement, Official or otherwise. Part of this blog post is taken and adapted from his post of June 26, 2015, the day the Supreme Court handed down its decision in Obergefell v. Hodges, and everything changed for the queer nation.
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